alexalex
148 reviews liked by alexalex
Pretty wild how after making some of the best scripted and most linear Call of Duty missions ever, Infinity Ward said "fuck it" and made one mission an immersive sim, complete with nonlinear objectives, interactive lights à la Thief, and a keypad with the code 451. What a flex.
Just playing this in case it's referenced in Dreamsettler
Finally finishing these games in 2023 killed whatever hope I had for Ken Levine's next project. This is the video game equivalent of a kid breaking his toys so nobody else gets to play with them.
Clock Tower 3
2002
With Clock Tower 3, I went in with rather low expectations considering this game got bad reviews in its time and is remembered even less fondly. I was pleasantly surprised. It's fun and quite frustration-free to play through, the story is good (best out of the Clock Tower series, for sure), it looks beautiful and the atmosphere is downright excellent in some levels. The music is good too, the voice acting is okay, and the cutscenes are a sight to behold.
They seemed very proud to have gotten Kinji Fukasaku (director of Battle Royale) to direct the cutscenes cuz they showed his name very prominently. Fair play; this was also his last major project before his death, bittersweetly enough.
While it has a few very scary and violent scenes, most of the game is relatively lighthearted, more like a funhouse than an actual haunting, and the tone of the game sometimes gets weird with the very Japanese humour. Some cutscenes are so goddamn goofy because of how proud they were of their motion-capture technology, they had actors flail around constantly to the point of hilarity. The gameplay also has a fair bit of PS2-era jank, particularly in the boss battles. But all of that adds to its charm at this point.
Side note, imo it has a really nice empowering story for young girls without being spiteful or overzealous. If I had a daughter I'd probably recommend this game to her. I'm 24 now okay. I get these types of thoughts sometimes lmao.
They seemed very proud to have gotten Kinji Fukasaku (director of Battle Royale) to direct the cutscenes cuz they showed his name very prominently. Fair play; this was also his last major project before his death, bittersweetly enough.
While it has a few very scary and violent scenes, most of the game is relatively lighthearted, more like a funhouse than an actual haunting, and the tone of the game sometimes gets weird with the very Japanese humour. Some cutscenes are so goddamn goofy because of how proud they were of their motion-capture technology, they had actors flail around constantly to the point of hilarity. The gameplay also has a fair bit of PS2-era jank, particularly in the boss battles. But all of that adds to its charm at this point.
Side note, imo it has a really nice empowering story for young girls without being spiteful or overzealous. If I had a daughter I'd probably recommend this game to her. I'm 24 now okay. I get these types of thoughts sometimes lmao.
Shin Megami Tensei V
2021
Of course you have blue hair and pronouns.
In defense of the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the presentation is fabulous. The steampunk character designs are snazzy, the animations are full of personality and life, the soundtrack is exhilarating, and there is plenty of the signature Ace Attorney goofball charm on display. As a cherry on top, one of the main characters is a broody gay Castlevania villain who alludes with suggestive frequency to his “hallowed chalice” and probably does nothing but listen to Wagnerian opera and file his nails in his free time. (Also, Susato and her little book <3)
Unfortunately it’s also possible to build a strong case against GAAC. Because I’m a killjoy, and because these games seem to get a free pass from most people, let’s look at some evidence. In this massive and lovingly rendered cast, there are, by my count, roughly forty named male characters, of every shape and size and age, two-thirds of whom are canonically older than thirty. (Of those over thirty, six play prominent recurring roles.) If you are beginning to suspect there might be fewer women in the game, congrats, you would be right! There are, in contrast, fifteen named women, four of whom are over thirty; of those four, only one is a semi-important character (the bad one, naturally).
Luckily, with such delightful character designs, I’m sure there will be plenty of variety in how the women look, right? Heck yeah—as a matter of fact there are two (2) female characters who are not conventionally attractive! (Both characters are simply fat—hardly the kind of inventive caricature we find in the male designs.) For further diversity, we have a Cute Judicial Assistant, Sexy Victorian Assassin, Cute Prima Ballerina, Cute Cockney Ragamuffin, Cute Girl Genius/Newspaper Serial Author, Cute Newlywed, Cute Yuri Bait, Sexy Witch, Sexy Housewife, Sexy Coroner, Spooky-Cute Goth Daughter, and uh Feisty-Cute Firecracker Salesgirl.
I know this might seem like outrageous nitpicking, and yes I know video game characters are designed to be appealing, and yes some of the men are hot. I’m not anti-hot-people. But in a game with so much care put into the art style, the disparity is bleak. If you can come up with forty different faces for dudes, you can probably come up with more than three faces for women. Jesus.
One could raise the old familiar argument: “Something historical blah blah but it was like that back then!” To which I would say: Holograms. Also this is a game in which a top-secret case highly sensitive to British national security is handled by a visiting student and a mysterious amnesiac. Absolutely nothing in GAAC makes any goddamn historical sense whatsoever. If the creators cared about history, color photography would not exist, and the queen would be aghast at all the foreigners running rampant in her courtroom.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to the story itself, which inhabits an awkward limbo between wacky cartoon and social commentary. Takumi seems to want to say something about racism, imperialism, the justice system, and government corruption, but he is significantly hampered by not understanding any of these things. Racism in the Takumi-verse is the result of a Japanese guy murdering your family. Corruption is the result of bad apples. Crime is the result of “letting the darkness consume you,” rather than, say, not having food. And so on. Worst of all, his critique of empire is one-directional. There is no attempt to draw any parallel between the British Empire and Imperial Japan. In fact, the narrative goes to some length to exonerate Japanese characters (except a tiny few) of wrongdoing; none of them have the racist misconceptions that the European characters are shown to have.
Lastly, holy moly, this game is looong, and I don’t think the fact that it was originally two games is much of an excuse. Way too much of GAAC—a solid 40% in my estimate—is artificial and unnecessary padding. You would not BELIEVE the mind-boggling number of gavel thwacks and podium pounds you will endure before end credits. It is at least four billion. The jury system is a pointless contrivance that only serves to draw out trials to agonizing lengths, and there is so much mind-numbing repetition of witness testimony and Herlock hijinks. Considering there is really just one big story being told here, there was no reason (except ¥¥¥) to release it as two games in the first place.
There is, however, a neat tap-dancing bit near the end that is almost worth the slog.
VERDICT: Guilty!! (of making me spend more than 60 hours on a game—using a guide no less, yikes)
Unfortunately it’s also possible to build a strong case against GAAC. Because I’m a killjoy, and because these games seem to get a free pass from most people, let’s look at some evidence. In this massive and lovingly rendered cast, there are, by my count, roughly forty named male characters, of every shape and size and age, two-thirds of whom are canonically older than thirty. (Of those over thirty, six play prominent recurring roles.) If you are beginning to suspect there might be fewer women in the game, congrats, you would be right! There are, in contrast, fifteen named women, four of whom are over thirty; of those four, only one is a semi-important character (the bad one, naturally).
Luckily, with such delightful character designs, I’m sure there will be plenty of variety in how the women look, right? Heck yeah—as a matter of fact there are two (2) female characters who are not conventionally attractive! (Both characters are simply fat—hardly the kind of inventive caricature we find in the male designs.) For further diversity, we have a Cute Judicial Assistant, Sexy Victorian Assassin, Cute Prima Ballerina, Cute Cockney Ragamuffin, Cute Girl Genius/Newspaper Serial Author, Cute Newlywed, Cute Yuri Bait, Sexy Witch, Sexy Housewife, Sexy Coroner, Spooky-Cute Goth Daughter, and uh Feisty-Cute Firecracker Salesgirl.
I know this might seem like outrageous nitpicking, and yes I know video game characters are designed to be appealing, and yes some of the men are hot. I’m not anti-hot-people. But in a game with so much care put into the art style, the disparity is bleak. If you can come up with forty different faces for dudes, you can probably come up with more than three faces for women. Jesus.
One could raise the old familiar argument: “Something historical blah blah but it was like that back then!” To which I would say: Holograms. Also this is a game in which a top-secret case highly sensitive to British national security is handled by a visiting student and a mysterious amnesiac. Absolutely nothing in GAAC makes any goddamn historical sense whatsoever. If the creators cared about history, color photography would not exist, and the queen would be aghast at all the foreigners running rampant in her courtroom.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to the story itself, which inhabits an awkward limbo between wacky cartoon and social commentary. Takumi seems to want to say something about racism, imperialism, the justice system, and government corruption, but he is significantly hampered by not understanding any of these things. Racism in the Takumi-verse is the result of a Japanese guy murdering your family. Corruption is the result of bad apples. Crime is the result of “letting the darkness consume you,” rather than, say, not having food. And so on. Worst of all, his critique of empire is one-directional. There is no attempt to draw any parallel between the British Empire and Imperial Japan. In fact, the narrative goes to some length to exonerate Japanese characters (except a tiny few) of wrongdoing; none of them have the racist misconceptions that the European characters are shown to have.
Lastly, holy moly, this game is looong, and I don’t think the fact that it was originally two games is much of an excuse. Way too much of GAAC—a solid 40% in my estimate—is artificial and unnecessary padding. You would not BELIEVE the mind-boggling number of gavel thwacks and podium pounds you will endure before end credits. It is at least four billion. The jury system is a pointless contrivance that only serves to draw out trials to agonizing lengths, and there is so much mind-numbing repetition of witness testimony and Herlock hijinks. Considering there is really just one big story being told here, there was no reason (except ¥¥¥) to release it as two games in the first place.
There is, however, a neat tap-dancing bit near the end that is almost worth the slog.
VERDICT: Guilty!! (of making me spend more than 60 hours on a game—using a guide no less, yikes)
Literally most of this game has Phoenix getting haunted by a ghost who does his job better than him. Also that ghost apparently has the power to make people's breasts bigger.
Rise of Skywalker if it was an Ace Attorney game
This is like if there was a Danganronpa game with Ace Attorney characters in it just replace hope and despair with dark age of the law
(spoiler drop at the end of the review)
Ambitious as it is messy, Apollo Justice is an interesting hodgepodge next entry in the series. It was a super pleasant ride for the good majority of it, but ultimately led to more frustration than I ever could've expected.
To start things positively, there's the general case mystery structure. Other than really 4-2, case mysteries are superwell structured in terms of the 'how' and 'why', with genuinely more grounded murders all wrapped in a different but welcome new tone. The pacing of it all tends to wobble between awful and bearable, but I still had an excellent experience putting the pieces together in something like 4-3.
The new characters range from completely new different types of cardboard to stare at like Apollo and Skye, to more interesting well developed characters, like the magicians, the Gavinners, and Trucy. They overall all feel very fresh and their own thematic struggles with the law and truth were interesting.
This does not extend to the massive elephant in the room. I can appreciate the outer workings and surface level wonders AJ pulls for a good amount of time, but there is something that needs to be addressed. Apollo Justice follows Trials and Tribulations with having a slowly moving and opened up puzzle box that reveals connections between cases that were always there that you can slowly pick up on and piece together.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Just kidding, Phoenix fucking Wright is here to tell you that he actually 5headed the entire game from day 1, and that you're literally on the coattails for him metanarratively pulling all the strings just so he can get revenge on this one dude in the most epic cucking ever staged. Words do not begin to describe the amount of frustration the final case for me was just to see all of the interesting thematic threads be tied to the dumbest character story I've seen thus far. Phoenix Wright actually brings down the entire game with his inclusion and having the whole story revolve around him. Fuck him, he was always cardboard in the previous games anyway and yet they somehow dropped the ball at even making his new struggle interesting.
Overall, despite my ridiculously jaded final impressions, I'd still recommend playing AA4 to an extent if you liked all the games previous. But you better be prepared for when it trips over the finish line and lands on its face.
Ambitious as it is messy, Apollo Justice is an interesting hodgepodge next entry in the series. It was a super pleasant ride for the good majority of it, but ultimately led to more frustration than I ever could've expected.
To start things positively, there's the general case mystery structure. Other than really 4-2, case mysteries are superwell structured in terms of the 'how' and 'why', with genuinely more grounded murders all wrapped in a different but welcome new tone. The pacing of it all tends to wobble between awful and bearable, but I still had an excellent experience putting the pieces together in something like 4-3.
The new characters range from completely new different types of cardboard to stare at like Apollo and Skye, to more interesting well developed characters, like the magicians, the Gavinners, and Trucy. They overall all feel very fresh and their own thematic struggles with the law and truth were interesting.
This does not extend to the massive elephant in the room. I can appreciate the outer workings and surface level wonders AJ pulls for a good amount of time, but there is something that needs to be addressed. Apollo Justice follows Trials and Tribulations with having a slowly moving and opened up puzzle box that reveals connections between cases that were always there that you can slowly pick up on and piece together.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Just kidding, Phoenix fucking Wright is here to tell you that he actually 5headed the entire game from day 1, and that you're literally on the coattails for him metanarratively pulling all the strings just so he can get revenge on this one dude in the most epic cucking ever staged. Words do not begin to describe the amount of frustration the final case for me was just to see all of the interesting thematic threads be tied to the dumbest character story I've seen thus far. Phoenix Wright actually brings down the entire game with his inclusion and having the whole story revolve around him. Fuck him, he was always cardboard in the previous games anyway and yet they somehow dropped the ball at even making his new struggle interesting.
Overall, despite my ridiculously jaded final impressions, I'd still recommend playing AA4 to an extent if you liked all the games previous. But you better be prepared for when it trips over the finish line and lands on its face.
